ELECTION '96.

City Voter Turnout Blows To A Low

Chicago long has been known for wind and politics, but never together like this.

To hear city officials talk Thursday, the same muscular gusts that kicked up dust and debris Tuesday and manhandled pedestrians around the city also held a lot of voters back from the polls.

As a result, the percentage of registered voters who cast ballots was the lowest ever in a Chicago presidential primary, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners said.

Officials still are not finished tallying the ballots, but they said they were convinced that the number would not exceed 466,038, or 35 percent of the 1,331,539 city residents who were eligible to vote.

That would dip below the 1948 record low participation in a presidential primary, when 37.16 percent of Chicago's registered voters showed up at the polls.

"I couldn't believe it. I knew turnout would be low, but not like this," said Tom Leach, spokesman for the city election board.

"Those gale-force winds blew an ill will through the ballot boxes."

Leach maintained that had it not been for the weather, voter turnout would have been much higher.

All day Tuesday, he had been projecting 40 percent turnout. At 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m., that figure was holding firm.

But as Leach's estimates stayed the same, the wind was blowing ever stronger. Shortly before 5 p.m., about the time many Chicagoans were leaving work and heading to the polls, gusts reached as high as 44 m.p.h. at O'Hare International Airport, according to the National Weather Service.

Leach surmised that is why the turnout dropped below even his last estimate for the day, 38 percent, at 6 p.m.

"I should have dropped it to lower than that," he said Thursday. "It's clear to me that the weather had a lot to do with it. After 3 p.m., the numbers of voters who actually came out to vote dropped drastically, and that's usually when we get our biggest number of voters."

Cold weather usually does not deter Chicago voters, Leach said. But he figured that Windy City residents were frightened away by the dangerous gusts.

Tuesday's turnout was disappointing, but it was not the all-time low for a Chicago election.

During the special general election in the 2nd Congressional District last year, turnout was a paltry 18.98 percent. And in the 1958 municipal election, only 29.14 percent of the city's registered voters showed up at their polling places.

According to Leach, the highest voter turnout for a Chicago election was in the 1944 general election, when 91.45 percent of the voters cast ballots.

Leach said the elections board will do its best to beef up voter turnout for the Nov. 5 general election. He said the agency will remind citizens to vote. But it really can't do much else.

If history is any indicator, however, there is not much cause to worry about establishing a new low this fall.

In 1948, while turnout for the primary ebbed, it increased dramatically to 87.51 percent for the general election.